Integral Reflections offers an extension of the ideas presented through "The Healing Project" website. These include the will to healing at personal, social, spiritual and environmental levels, the discussion of textual sources from which intellectual and spiritual nourishment can be drawn, the maintenance of a watching brief on the turbulent currents that course through the present times, and the exploration of poetic consciousness as a transmitter of the deeper dimensions of human experience.

Subscribe To

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

E.F. Schumacher. A Voice for Wisdom in an Age of Folly

The economist E.F. Schumacher has served as a source of inspiration for many over the past half-century. His essential message is carried in two books published in the five years before he died, Small is Beautiful. A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973) and A Guide for the Perplexed (1977).

His ideas continue to be explored, developed and disseminated by such groups as the Schumacher Society in the UK and the New Economics Institute in the US as well as numerous individuals and groups in both the developed and developing world.

This post offers both an audio presentation drawn from two lectures given by Schumacher in the 1970s and a review of some of his ideas as presented in Small is Beautiful.

E.F. Schumacher. A Voice for Wisdom in an Age of Folly can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 file is also available for download here.

Regarding Small is Beautiful

In this time of
ageing empires and of fruitless opinions, it can only be helpful to reconsider
the reflections of those who would show us ways out of the maelstrom that
presently engulfs our civilisation. E.F. Schumacher was such a one.

Copies of
Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, first published in 1973, can still be found
in many libraries. And it occasionally chances as an unexpected treasure on the
shelves of second hand bookshops. Although the book was published as a small
paperback, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

As an economist,
E.F. Schumacher was more interested in determining how economics could be made
to serve human needs than in detailing the adventurism of rapacious financial
institutions and their pursuit of big profits. His work has had a profound
influence on many who seek to restore the rhythms and capacities of an earth
that has been sorely damaged by industrial civilisation and its destructive
technologies. In his own words:

“We must thoroughly understand the problem and
begin to see the possibility of evolving a new life-style, with new methods of
production and new patterns of consumption: a life-style designed for
permanence.”

Schumacher
identifies Keynesian economics as a primary driver of the politics of greed
that has steadily consumed the latter half of the twentieth century. A few
years before the collapse of the world-wide economic system in 1930, Keynes
wrote:

“For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to
everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is
not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer
still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into
daylight.”

Pity, says
Schumacher, that we listened to Keynes and not to Gandhi.

Eighty years after
Keynes issued his decree, powerful nations and their financial institutions
continue to insist on their freedom to exercise avarice and usury regardless of
the effects of their actions on the lives of individuals and families, or on
the health and stability of an increasingly ravaged planet.

We saw this
expressed in the refusal by the Clinton and Bush Administrations in the US and
the former Howard Government in Australia to support the implementation of the
Kyoto Protocols during the 1990s and more recently in the covert corporate
manipulations enabled by the deregulation of Wall Street – again under the
aegis of the Clinton and Bush Administrations - that has seen millions of
Americans dispossessed of their houses while managers of mortgage funds
pocketed seven and eight figure salaries in return.

Regarding the
obscene levels of energy consumption in the US and its aggressive promotion of
nuclear power, Schumacher reminds us of the conveniently neglected fact that
nuclear reactors have a finite life beyond which they become unusable and
unserviceable. Every reactor in use today will become an incandescent monument
emitting vast amounts of radiation for centuries to come. Flesh and blood
simply cannot adapt to high levels of radioactivity because of the inherent
nature of DNA. If the world does not end with a bang, the whimper of ghostly
mutations will echo long through the lives of future generations.

We have witnessed
this in the Ukraine and Belarus after Chernobyl and more recently in Iraq,
where the widespread aerosol dispersal of over three hundred tons of depleted
uranium used in weapon-piercing artillery during the first Gulf War has
resulted in the birthing of monstrously deformed foetuses and children. We have
yet to fully witness the tragic visitation of radiation-caused disease and
genetic mutation on the people of Japan as a result of the Fukushima meltdowns.

E.F. Schumacher
points to the essential malignancy of a technological civilisation which, in
the guise of easing life's burdens, has in fact hastened the progressive
poisoning of the earth and of humanity. When Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful four decades ago, he meticulously detailed
the excesses and disparities that were tearing the world apart at that time.
The situation has steadily worsened since the time of his writing.

Schumacher called
for a reversal of the gigantism and the obsession with globalisation that were
beginning to overtake governments both North and South. His suggestions found
no resonance in the dominant political and economic powers. These powers are
more intent on driving the world towards more of everything than in restraining
an empty consumerism that sweeps through the world in the name of economic
growth.

Yet between the
lines, Schumacher calls our attention to the fact that committed individuals
and visionary groups have been quietly work towards developing ways of living
and new technologies that are more in keeping with the needs of the earth and
her people than with those of shareholders and their corporate minders.

E.F. Schumacher
calls for the creation of educational systems in both the developed and the
developing world that are more attuned to the perennial rhythms of the earth
and which nurture the development of wisdom, compassion and skill rather than
satisfying industry-driven demands to create new cadres of compliant
technicians and robotic technocrats.

Such individuals as
Satish Kumar and Vandana Shiva have become powerful advocates for Schumacher’s
ideas. They, along with many others, have taken up the work of awakening and
informing all who would hear that blindly continuing to pursue the goals of
industrial civilisation does not bode well for humanity and its home.

Strong Gandhian
sentiments permeate Schumacher’s work. He bluntly demolishes the myth of
limitless growth as the natural destiny of economies and nations. Yet the common
sense spoken by Schumacher is still nowhere to be seen in the economic and
political style of the present day. There has been little if any change in the
way things are done since he delivered his message forty years ago.

A profound
aesthetic sense is expressed in Schumacher’s thought. He continually returns to
the criteria of beauty, of elegance, of non-violence and of human scale in his
pursuit of a workable future for humanity during a time of growing
uncertainties.

E.F. Schumacher
remains an enduring source of wisdom in an age of madness and folly.

Follow by Email

I have an ongoing commitment to healing in all its dimensions: personal, social, spiritual, political and environmental. Having now retired as an educator and practitioner in complementary medicine, my present interests turn to performance poetry, wrestling with William Blake's epic pieces, and a slow but steady translation of a number of Italian texts.